Catching Up

The Mid-South Technology Conference (Twitter hashtag #mstc09) is over, and I am back in the classroom overseeing essays from my 7th graders today. Life returns to normal just in time for the Christmas holidays to hit. Sigh.

I will take the next few days and put up some of my thoughts regarding the sessions I attended at TETC and MSTC. Both had their good points along with some areas for improvement. If I get really brave, I might even tell you which one I enjoyed better. Hmmmm.

UPDATE: I mentioned in a previous blog about Alan November demonstrating the ease and power of Jing to create and disseminate screencast tutorials. I also mentioned that its host site, www.screencast.com is blocked in our TN schools. Today, I received a very nice email from Dave McCollom. Dave’s title is Education Evangelist. I absolutely want that title! Dave has offered to help in anyway he can to bring the filtering curtain down from around screencast. This tells me two things. First, Jing is definitely customer friendly. Second, Jing is paying attention. Two valuable lessons for us to practice in the classrooms I suppose. I’ll let you know more when I hear back from ENA regarding my unblock request.

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6 Comments

I was also really impressed with Alan November’s session. I would point out that there is an easy workaround for the screencast.com problem. Archive.org, where he showed us the wayback machine, allows you to upload any files you own the rights to, and they will host them for free. Then you can just post the link on your website, just as if you had hosted it at screencast.com.

I have been using it for a couple of years now to host my podcasts and screencasts. Hope that helps.

Brian, that is an awesome idea! Thank you so much for sharing it. While I hope to get screencast unblocked, I do have other videos I create that would be perfect for your workaround. That’s the power of the DEN!